CROWDS AND CROWD-MEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3101, 20 August 1913, Page 75

CROWDS AND CROWD-MEN.

MR. GERALD STANLEY LEE’S SCHEME OF SALVATION FOR DEMOCRACY. (By John o’ London.) Here is a modern and reverberant title : “ Crowds: A Study of the Genius of Democracy, and the Fears, Desires, and Expectations of the People ” (Methuen). It is a title that suggests a certain “ wild seraphic fire.” And. of such Mr Gerald Stanley Lee’s book is full—it burns and toils and intensifies itself through all its maze of books, parts, and chapters. It is rather a prose-poem than an argument, or it is an argument conducted on the plane of vision and prophecy. On his pictorial side Mr Lee reminds one of Whitman’s joy in the spectacle of democracy. The street, he says, is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll or swing on top of a ’bus through it—the miles of faces, all these tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all sides of you windows, and along the walks the things they wear, and the things they cat, and the things they pour down their little throats, and the things they pray to, and curse and worship and swindle in ! . . I 0311 never say why 7, but so strange is it so full of awe is' it, and t»f splendour and pity, that there arc times when, rolling and. swinging along on top of a ’bus, with all its strange, fearful joy 7 of life about me, within me, it is as if on top of my ’bus' I had seen far away 7 in some infinite space and had felt heaven and hell sweep past. Or he is in New York pointing out to us the stupendous symbols which the new democracy has already found for itself: the Metropolitan Tower and the skyscraper (“ New York scooping its will out of the very heavens ”) expressive of the souls of these modern, heaven-strik-ing men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very 7 tunnels, and lifting them as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to heaven ! All through this book Mr Lee keeps before us the spectacle of an incalculable, hungering democracy, standing as yet uncertain and unled in the dawn of a new era. And, he asks. Who are to be its saviours The Inspired Employers.— The saviours of the crowd, he holds, must be men who completely accept and believe in a crowd civilisation. The man who now attempts to interpret anything in art or life without understanding the crowd, and without relating his problem to the crowd, is a mere helpless spectator of the modern world. He distinguishes three classes of men—the Me-man, the Class-man, and the Crowd-man —in order of development. Where shall the Crowdmen be found ? Mr Lee is convinced that they must be looked for to-day not amour preachers, poets, and legislators, but among the employers of labour, the inventors, and the organisers. The inspired employers are they 7 , for whom the world waits. “It is they who are standing today on the great strategical irround of our time. They 7 hold the pass of human life.’.’ We are not to fear that trusts and millionaires will be what they have been in the past. To both, by experience and by 7 failure, a new conception of business has come.

Mr Rockefeller became rich by cooperating with other rich men to exploit the public. The man of the im mediate future is going to get rich, as rich as he cares tp be, by co-operating not merely with his competitors—which is as far’ as Rockefeller got,—but by co-operating with the people. It is a mere matter of social imagination, of seeing which succeeds most permanently and honourably, of pip tin what has been called “ goodness ” and what is going to be called “business’’ together. In other words, social imagination is going to make the man gravitate towards mutual interest and co-operation, which is the now and inevitable level of efficiency and .success in business. Success is being transferred from men of millionaire genius to men of social and human genius. Social imagination, cultivated on both sides, is also to unite Capital and Labour. It will take the form of a broad, a le--1 i g; o u-, co - p a rtne r sh i p. —The Futility of Force.— Mr Lee is convinced that each side is already approaching the other under a new sense of the futility of force and the fruitfulness of mutual understanding. The Crowd, he contends, has almost arrived at two conclusions: the first is that no Labour leader who thinks merely of the interests of his class has the root of the matter in him; the second is that no Labour leader, be he Socialist or Syndicalist, who believes in force will lead them to victory. When the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their hats in a hundred nations, with one big, hoarse hurrah around a world, with five minutes’ experience come rushing in and propose to take up the world —the whole world —in two minutes more and run it in the same old bygone way, the way that the capitalists are just giving up—by force—it knows what it thinks. It thinks it will fight Class Syndicalism. It makes up its mind it will fight Class Syndicalism with Crowd Syndicalism. It has decided that, in the interests of all of us, , a Crowd civilisation, in what wo call the world or Crowd Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by the owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever they are, who can control them with the most skill and efficiency. We are brought back to the figure of the Crowd-man whose business genius is social genius, and whose inventiveness will ex-

tend from matter and organisation into human naturo itself.

—.The Bible of Co-partersbip. —

Such, as early as I can represent it in rapid summary, is Mr Gerald Stanley Lee’s scheme of salvation for democracy. He expounds it with unfailing eloquence, and with an abundance —nay, a plethora—of rhythmical and incisive phrase. This is an agitating and memorable book, filled with live formulas and arrowy trutlis. It may Some to be called the Bible of Copartnership. Beyond that point I am unprepared to accept it as canonical.